I'm sorry, this book was such a quick read, by the time I thought about blogging on my progress, I was done with it. Not only with the first, but I found myself finishing the whole trilogy in 4 days.

When I started the book, I was going to write about how it was leaving me flat. I picked the book for the club because I liked the concept of it: a girl who gets pulled into people's dreams. However, when I started reading it, it wasn't what I expected. Yes, it was about a girl who gets pulled into dreams and I still found it interesting, but the style it was written in didn't suite me well. The author broke up the book by dates and times- January 4th, 2006: 10:43am. That kind of thing, but then she didn't explain the reasoning behind it. And even after reading all three books (which are all in this style), I still don't get why she did it. Introducing a style like that is difficult enough for the reader, that without an explanation, readers will find themselves angry with the book instead of enjoying it. At least I found myself that way. I hated the fact that I would get into a scene, be excited about what was happening and then find myself wondering how much time passed. How long was the dream she was pulled into? Or how many days passed since her last big moment? It broke up the momentum I was in and as conscience as I was about doing it, I couldn't stop flipping those pages back.

I still liked the concept, the story and the plot. I think those elements alone was interesting enough to keep me reading. I liked the dynamic of Janie and Cabel, how they could read each other and call out each others bullshit. The Captain was my favorite character, with her sensitive seriousness. And if you read the rest of the series as I did, you'll see even more why I liked her. I also didn't even mind the third person, present tense the author chose. It gave us an ominous narrator who knew things Janie didn't know and would learn as the story progressed. I am curious, though, to see what they story could have been like in first person. Actually hearing Janie's words as she describes the pull of being sucked into dreams and how awful the nightmares are in comparison.

I think McMann had a good story here, but I also think it could have been great if it was executed differently.

As for what the book club thinks, we meet April 20th. I'll let you know then.

Overall, we did enjoy reading Princess of the Midnight Ball, but at time we felt we needed more from it. As one of us said "I want all or nothing." We understood that we knew what the characters knew. When we were with Galen, we saw what he saw, with Rose we heard what she heard. However, even in that regard we wanted to know more. What was it like for Rose to dance every night as sick as she was? How bad was it really for the little ones that made them cry about it? Unfortunately, we don't see any of the midnight ball until Galen saw it. We got it, we did, but the not knowing just killed us.